Bottling Day!
On New Year’s Eve afternoon, the bubbles settled down to once every 73 seconds, so I called JM and he brought over the bottling equipment.
While he was driving over, I started peeling labels off a bunch of Heineken bottles. This involved softening the labels in hot water, peeling them off, then scrubbing off the glue.
Then we siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket. This gave me my first opportunity to taste the finished product. It’s still young, but the promised banana and clove esters were prevalent. The body was sweet with plenty of the original malt flavor present. The alcohol didn’t seem particularly overpowering. It was more of a flavor element than the dominant factor. The overall flavor experience was promising for the future of the mature product. I think I’ll enjoy drinking this.
Then I started bottling. I thought this would be a messy ordeal, so I planned some steps to keep things clean, like a bowl under the bottling area to catch any spillover or drips from the bottling wand. This proved a wise decision. Cleanup was very easy.
With JM’s and Joleen’s help, the actual bottling process took just under an hour. We formed an assembly line of bottles queuing up to be filled, then the crown caps were placed, then they were crimped.
I drew off the dregs of the bottling bucket for a final taste test and reward to myself for the finished job and enjoyed a couple of nice, tall frosty glasses of ale. There was certainly a bit of sediment in those dregs, and I figured there would be in the last dozen bottles, so I tagged the lids as the bottles that I’ll taste to monitor the maturity over the next few weeks.
March 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I noticed someone found this entry by searching on removing labels from Heineken bottles, so I figured I’d elaborate on the procedure. We heated up water in the stock pot, then submerged as many of the bottles as would fit. We let the labels soften for a minute or so, then we pulled the bottles out and immediately peeled an end of each label with a table knife, and peeled the rest of the label off by hand. I seem to recall that the front label was more difficult to remove than the back and the neck labels. They seemed to use stickier glue. There was usually a good bit of glue left behind, so I used a scrubber sponge to get the remaining adhesive off. The sponge gummed up fairly quickly and frequently needed some maintenance to clear it up for the next few bottles.
I don’t think I want to use Heineken bottles anymore. The green glass is a little less sturdy than brown and doesn’t block light from spoiling the hops. Also, a 12oz bottle just isn’t a proper serving size for beer. Next time I want 16 or 22oz brown bottles.